that girl drive past my church in a car she didn't have in June. I see the pictures of the little one's birthday party on that Facebook her aunt keeps. I see a child who has not asked me for one thing since she was nine years old come to me in September and ask whether I thought Orlando was the kind of trip that was really important, or whether it was just a band thing." She set down the knife. "Just a band thing. That's what she called it. As if she were trying to talk herself out of it in front of me."
"I told her no on Orlando," Barrett said. "Not Leti. Me. It's fourteen hundred dollars and the roof's going."
"I know you did."
"You could have paid for it. You offered and I said no, and that's on me, too."
"I know that as well." Winifred turned around and folded her arms over her cardigan. She was seventy-one and small and her glasses hung on a beaded chain her students had made for her retirement, and she looked at him the way she must have looked at a thousand fifth-grade boys outside her office, with patience that was more frightening than anger. "I'm going to ask you one question and then we'll have pie. Where did your wife get twenty thousand dollars?"
He opened his mouth and found nothing in it.
"She'll tell you the ex-husband paid. Ask her how much he paid. Ask her when." His mother picked up two plates. "That's all. Bryony, honey, pecan or pumpkin?"
They had pecan. Bryony ate hers slowly with the fork upside down, the way Leigh used to eat dessert, a habit she could not possibly remember learning because she had been three years old when her mother moved to Denver. Winifred talked about her book club and the new pastor who used too many slides. Barrett said the right things at the right times and felt the folded page in the breast pocket of his shirt the whole while, against his chest, like a second, slower pulse.
It was a twenty-minute drive from his mother's house in the old neighborhood off Hillside to theirs in the development out past Rock Road, and for the first ten minutes Bryony looked out the passenger window at the dark and said nothing. The truck's heater ticked. The radio was on the classical station because it was the only thing they had ever agreed on, and somebody was playing a piano in a room a long way off.
"Is it still a no," she said finally. "On Orlando. You said we'd talk about it again."
"It's still a no for now, Bry."
"The deposit's due November first. Mr. Brinkerhoff says if you miss the deposit you can't get on later. They already have the hotel rooms counted."